Cycle Lanes to Morchêne

The morning after my dusk dash out to Cléry, I set off again from the middle of Orléans at half past eight on a grey Monday. It was 7°C, the air was damp and there was barely a breath of southerly wind. The plan was simple: an easy spin south of the Loire, out towards the edge of the Sologne, and back before mid-morning.

Orléans makes leaving town easy. A painted bike lane runs down Rue Royale beneath the arcades, with its own traffic lights, and from there it was over the Loire and east through Saint-Jean-le-Blanc. Within a few kilometres the houses gave way to the open farmland of Saint-Denis-en-Val.

Here a smooth cycle path ran between freshly ploughed fields and bright green verges, and the back lanes were empty apart from the odd farm shed. The valley floor is about as flat as riding gets: for the first dozen kilometres the road hardly rose at all.

The fields grew bigger as I headed south, and a wheeled irrigation rig sat parked over the bare soil beside Rue de Ligny as I rolled into Saint-Cyr-en-Val. The village church, Saint-Sulpice, stands over a quiet junction in the middle of the village, its spire bright against the cloud. Joan of Arc came through here in April 1429, on her way to lift the siege of Orléans.

Just beyond it is the Domaine de Morchêne, a big wooded park the commune has owned since 1988, with the Château de Morchêne at its heart, a brick-and-stone house built in 1904. I swung past the château itself, then a painted board beside the red cycle path pointing the way back to it.

Heading south from Morchêne, the road finally tilted upwards, ever so slightly. The five-kilometre drag towards Farges gained all of 35 metres, and it was where I pushed hardest all morning. The high point of the ride, a heady 130 metres, came at the far end of the loop, where the lane met the road to Ardon on the edge of Marcilly-en-Villette, where the open fields start giving way to the woods of the Sologne.

I turned for home there and came back north up the western side of the loop, and with the light southerly now at my back the return leg came noticeably quicker. The bare trees along the lanes were hung with great clumps of mistletoe, just like the ones I’d passed on the levée the evening before.